


Fire Weather

by leiascully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode Related, Episode Remix, F/M, Reconciliation, Relationship(s), Religion, Terrorism, The X-Files Revival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-21
Updated: 2016-02-21
Packaged: 2018-05-22 11:17:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6077367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She has plenty of time to think on her way out to the house.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fire Weather

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: 10.05 "Babylon"  
> A/N: One day I will rewrite this whole unsatisfactory episode.  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

She has plenty of time to think on her way out to the house. Her car jolts along the familiar ruts in the road and her body compensates automatically, swaying with the motion. When she checked the weather today, her phone momentarily thought she was somewhere else, showing her a forecast that bore little resemblance to her life. There was a triangle with an exclamation point, some kind of alert, and she clicked it, curious. Fire weather warning, it said: gusty winds and dry conditions, be wary of sparks that could be fanned into flame. Abruptly, her phone caught up with the slow yaw of the world, and gave her the right forecast, and she dressed and left and drove off into a world that contained something called fire weather. 

Maybe there's room for a fire weather warning in her life. God knows there are sparks. God knows there could be flames. There were flames for the young men in Texas, certainly She has always had the messages she needed to hear arrive through strange back channels. It's unsurprising that the forecast might have some deeper relevance, and much easier to bear than Luther Boggs.

When she arrives and swings herself out of the SUV, Mulder is sitting on the porch. She had dreams for that porch once, to screen it in and turn it into a sanctuary. She doesn't remember when she gave up - the part of their life that lead to her leaving is a blur of misery. She's too far distant from it to feel the ache anymore. That's dangerous, she knows; Mulder is the drink she never refuses another round of, even when she's so far gone she can already feel the consequences looming. But he seems better now. 

It feels like a movie set: the light, the breeze, the way he waits and watches her, as if all of this were inevitably scripted. She imagines watching herself saunter across the lawn and up the steps. What part does she play in the drama of her life? She is the world-weary fifty-something, childless and heartbroken, returning to the home she could not hold together, and simultaneously the lightness of her steps recalls the memory of the bright-eyed woman of twenty-eight, meeting him for the first time. Which one will she be when she reaches him, and which of a thousand Mulders will he be? Schrodinger would adore her, she thinks, for the potentialities she contains, and Mulder too. She can't help smiling at him. Fox Mulder, the love of her life. Fox Mulder, the father of her absent son. She wished, for a while, that she could be furious enough with him to leave completely, but she and Mulder have shared too much between them, a covalent bond they can never unravel. 

Sparks. 

He pulls the earbuds from his ears and pushes himself out of the chair as she approaches. She tips her chin inquisitively and he holds one tiny earphone close enough for her to hear the tinny scrape of the guitar on "A Case Of You". Of course, she thinks, of course. Their synchronicity is unaltered by the distance between them.

"Joni Mitchell," she says, leaning against the porch railing.

"Classic," he says, turning it off and putting the phone in his pocket. 

She nods. "Talk to me, Mulder," she says. 

"Oh," he says noncommittally, "where to begin?"

"Begin at the beginning," she tells him.

"In the beginning there was the word," he says, and gives her that crooked grin, and she wonders how they ever spent time apart.

"Babylon," she says. 

"A house divided," he says. "A city with a river running through it." 

"Makes for a hell of a parable," she says.

He inclines his head. "You know it was the largest city in the world, once upon a time. A wonder of the world. Think of the astounding things we can create, when we work together."

"Think of the astounding speed with which things fall apart," she counters.

"That's more than a little pessimistic, Scully," he says, but his eyes crinkle at the corners with warmth as he looks at her.

She shrugs. "Newton's Second Law of Thermodynamics. Nobody wins against entropy."

He nods thoughtfully. "Walk with me, Scully."

They reach out to each other, of one mind. She clasps his hand in both of hers and lets him pull her up off the ledge of the porch. He measures his strides against hers as they walk down the steps to the dry grass of the lawn. It's not a season of growth and yet, near the roots, she knows there are green shoots that are pushing toward the sun. She feels the same thing under her heart, which has lain fallow since she left. The world bares its belly to the sun and the flowers bloom again, against all odds. 

"Tell me about entropy," he says, as their joined hands swing easily between them, now brushing his thigh, now grazing her hip.

"Chaos increases in a closed system," she says. "The strong arrow of time, for all your wishing, only runs one way. The genie can't be put back into the bottle. We age until our body systems begin to fail. A warming planet continues to warm until it reaches some tipping point."

"A fractured society continues to fracture," he says. 

"Hatred as entropy?" she asks. "Even for a psychologist, that's a reach."

"Hatred spawns chaos," he says. "Even a strict rationalist like you can admit that." 

"I may grant the premise," she says. Their banter has a comfortable rhythm, paced to the slow thud of her heart maybe, or the crunch of their steps through the dead grass, and then down the gravel of the drive. 

"But?" he asks.

"But I'm guessing your inevitable corollary would be that if hate is entropic, then love would be the opposite. Love would restore order to the universe."

"Is that so hard to believe?" he asks, pivoting toward her. 

She gazes up at him. The sun glints on the silver threads in his hair and casts shadows under his eyes. 

"It's a beautiful idea," she says. "But not a rational one."

"What about love has ever been rational?" he asks softly.

"Not much," she tells him, but her fingers tighten in his. 

"The God of the Old Testament is a vengeful god, Scully." He squints down at her. "Young men and women all over the world are still dying for Abraham's god. The god of the Torah. The god of the Koran. They imagine that sacrifice is still demanded of them." 

"Fanaticism has always been deadly," she says. "Abraham nearly sacrificed his own son." Guilt jabs at her; surely she is no better, sending her son into the unknown, in the hope that he might escape the dangers of her world.

"Love and hate mixed together," Mulder muses. "A volatile concoction." 

"You and I have spoken before about how devotion might be a form of madness," she reminds him. "Father O'Fallon blew up his own crypt to avoid facing what he deemed a challenge to his faith. I shot a man and blamed it on the devil." 

"Devotion to a god who encourages or is interpreted to encourage murder in the name of his glory sounds like madness to me," Mulder tells her, "but I admit my experience with deities is limited." 

"You and I saw another kind of devotion represented in this case," she says. "The devotion of a mother to her son."

"Yes, we did," he says. "Not sure if I would call that madness." 

"I would," she says, her chest aching. "A holy madness, but madness nonetheless." 

"So what's our Tower of Babel?" he asks. "What's our work of hubris, so egregious that it cannot be allowed to stand?" 

"Maybe it's our children," she says. "Maybe there is no greater arrogance than to imagine we could protect them from those who seek to use them as pawns in their hateful schemes." 

"Tools of hate, begotten by love, " Mulder says. "I refuse the premise, Scully."

"On what grounds?" she asks, not meeting his eyes. 

He ducks his head until he catches her gaze again. "I know you," he says. "I know how your parents felt about their children. I know how you feel about yours. Nothing that selfless could be deemed worthy of punishment even by the most vengeful god." 

Her breath catches in her throat with a soft sound. She leans forward against the familiar breadth of his chest, and he folds his arms around her. This is the home that no motel or house ever was. This is the comfort she longs for. 

"Tell me your theory, " she says. 

"My theory?" His voice is a gentle rumble in her ear. "My theory is evolving. But maybe what terrorists are terrified by is the idea that one day, nothing will divide us. We'll return to that state of grace in which anything is possible. We'll build that tower to the heavens and touch the sky."

"That doesn't sound terrifying to me," she says, leaning back so that she can look up at him again. 

"Think of all we'd have to give up, " he says. "Think of all the pride we take in dividing ourselves. Our religions, our cultures, our languages. Those things are precious."

"As precious as our children?" she asks.

He says nothing, but reaches for her hand again, swinging it gently until she can't help but smile at him again. 

"We know better," he says at last.

"Maybe this time, we will," she says.

"Maybe this time a lot of things will be different," he says, and she reaches up to cup his cheek with her hand.

"I hope so," she says, and tugs him gently down for a kiss. Fire weather, she thinks briefly, giddily, because oh, there are sparks, a conflagration of them. The universe moves through them, starlight and sea breezes, particles of god, particles of each other. She thinks of all that's left to discover, all the mysteries they haven't solved. When she opens her eyes, the sun is dazzling. 

"Listen," he says, his expression awed. "Listen. Do you hear that?"

All she hears is her pulse pounding in her ears and the sift of wind through the grass and the collapse of all the walls she put up. Like Jericho, when the trumpets sound, her defenses crumble, though she's sure the call that brought down that city was more musical than Mulder's rasp. Still, he's the frequency that makes her resonate. She laces her fingers through his and can almost hear the music he strains to catch.

"Tell me," she says.


End file.
